Beast Industries, the holding company behind YouTube creator Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast), has acquired Step, a fintech app targeting teens and young adults. Step offers fee-free banking accounts, a Visa card that builds credit scores, and savings tools, serving over 7 million users. The app runs on Evolve Bank & Trust for FDIC-insured deposits and card issuance. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Step raised $175 million in equity at a $1 billion valuation in 2021, and the price has likely dropped significantly since then (Inc.). As previously covered, Donaldson had already filed a trademark for "MrBeast Financial" in October 2025 (EFR).
The Feastables Playbook, Applied to Banking
The playbook mirrors what Donaldson did with Feastables, his chocolate brand that generated $250 million in revenue in 2024: take a commoditised product, wrap it in a massive distribution advantage (466 million YouTube subscribers, roughly 5 billion monthly views), and bet that near-zero customer acquisition costs can make thin-margin economics work. Simon Taylor drew the parallel neatly in his newsletter Fintech Brainfood: where Feastables competes against Hershey's, Step now competes against Greenlight and Cash App, but with far higher stickiness since a first bank account and a credit history are much harder to walk away from than a chocolate bar.
Can Creator Distribution Fix Teen Banking Economics?
The interesting question for embedded finance is whether creator-led distribution can genuinely reshape the economics of financial services. Teen banking has notoriously thin margins, with blended interchange on low-balance accounts and limited cross-sell. But if MrBeast can replicate the Feastables model, in which his brand alone replaces most of the marketing spend neobanks typically burn through, the unit economics shift dramatically. The real challenge may be less about distribution and more about the infrastructure: Step still relies on Evolve Bank & Trust, the same partner bank caught up in the Synapse collapse, and currently under a Federal Reserve consent order.
